Suburban Monsters

Hawkins (Downpour) spins the familiar into the grotesque in this chilling collection of 13 horror shorts. The author excels at putting dark twists on everyday domestic circumstances. A painter escapes an unhappy marriage with some supernatural aid in “Moonrise Over Water with Sargassum, 2022. Oil On Canvas.” In “Green Eyes,” a child cares for her ailing mother even after the woman’s death. An uncanny children’s TV show takes center stage in “The Stumblyum Imperative,” while in “A Candle for the Birthday Boy,” a six-year-old’s birthday party goes horribly wrong. The exceptional gore—narrators perform revolting actions such as probing “the glistening yellow-gray” of their own exposed fat, which “yields beneath [their] touch like molded gelatin” (“Storms of the Present”)—makes looking away impossible. Not all the stories are quite as successful, however. If, as in “Interlude,” about a little boy whose parents think he has a rash, the buildup is too mundane in its purposeful misdirection, what should be a delightful shock ending turns into a cheap trick. Still, plenty of entertainment lies within these pages. Readers will be thinking about Hawkins’s skin-crawling fables long after they turn off the lights. (Self-published)